do not check "do not show me this again" to the "you are running as root" dialog. Just close it.

yum update

open these ports in the firewall:

tcp/22

tcp/80

tcp/1935

tcp/18080

clean up eth0 configuration in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

remove UUID

remove any DHCP_CLIENT_ID

OPTIONAL:

shut down the VM

at this point the vm is at "baseOS" and can be used as a cloning point

There is a bug in VirtualBox with IPv6 handling over a bridged network. When the bug is present the top transfer speeds for IPv6 are around 18kb/s. Since RHEL (and derivatives) prefer IPv6 when looking up hosts, it is not uncommon to get an IPv6 host address for updates. To disable IPv6 on the guest add these lines to /etc/sysctl.conf. VirtualBox 4.2.12 was supposed to fix it but I'm not sure it has.

deleted files still take up space on the disk image. The disk image (as of 4/24/13) is roughly 12G in size, with 7.8G of actual data. Write zeros to a file until the disk is full to clear out the sectors which are unallocated but had data at one point. Since the .VDI image is sparsely allocated, the disk image size will actually grow less that 1G even though nearly 500G has been written.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo bs=1M oflag=direct; rm /tmp/foo

run /usr/share/avalon/dist-prep to prepare the machine for release

clear the command line history (history -cw)

shutdown the VM

Compact the disk image

On the host run:

VBoxManage modifyhd avalon-vm-disk-YYMMDD.vdi --compact

Export the appliance

Disable USB 2.0 in the VM to avoid a warning when users don't have the VirtualBox extensions loaded.